3105-Ch-6.qxd
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6:30 PM
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ART AND ENTERTAINMENT
to a mass audience – for example, on visiting cards, the mobile phones of their day. Photography threatened painting and drawing because it brought the fullness and particularity of past reality alive in the present, a quality Benjamin calls the ‘spark of contingency’ (1985a: 243). Photography can capture detail that the human consciousness cannot grasp even if the eye sees it: how a horse’s legs move at speed, or the detail of plants’ form. This capacity of photography – Benjamin calls it the ‘optical unconscious’ – captures what was there in the past and alters how we might see the same thing in the future. Early photography required long exposure times so that the human subject almost ‘grew into the picture’, producing an effect of ‘aura’, a mysterious quality of the light which seared the real presence of people into the image (Benjamin 1985: 245). The notion of ‘aura’ is for Adorno associated with the authenticity of an artwork, the spiritual enchantment such works absorb through religious ritual or the work of their creation that enables them to stand for their culture (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 19). But Benjamin was delighted by a new form of photography, particularly Eugène Atget’s documentary photographs of shopfronts, doorways, fireplaces and workers in the streets, that ‘pump[ed] the aura of reality out of the photograph like water out of a sinking ship’ (Benjamin 1985: 250). The documentary photograph such as Atget’s does not just represent reality, but becomes a comment on the world – and so begins to achieve something of that distance that Adorno identifies in the work of art. Painting has a market value based on the picture’s uniqueness, distinctiveness and desirability but photography could reproduce, endlessly, what had once been unique. The theme of Benjamin’s most well-known essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1973b), originally published in 1936, was the cultural impact of the image as a commodity that has to compete with an infinite number of identical photographic images, each costing a few pence to produce. The extension of industrial and mechanical means of reproduction (lithography, photography, film) to cultural products had a potentially transformatory impact on the traditional form of art. Benjamin suggests that the ‘aura’, the authenticity, specialness, uniqueness of the artwork, ‘withers in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (1973b: 215). From magical and religious rituals to the exhibition that situated individual works within the oeuvre of an artist or school of painting, cultural practices gave the value and meaning of aura to artworks by establishing their distance from the profane and mundane everyday world. For Benjamin, the destruction of aura in modernity was driven by the desire of the contemporary masses to bring their lived world closer: ‘… the adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception’ (1973b: 217). With moving film it is the technical choice of angles, intercut shots, closeups, and so on, that reduces reality to just two dimensions; acting too becomes technical as performance is fragmented over a long period without
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